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In a democracy where the federal government is functioning correctly, what Donald Trump just did on Fox News should never have happened.
Democratic governments are supposed to have a separation of powers. Federal law enforcement is independent of the president and the Executive Branch. Law enforcement should be free of political influence to ensure independence.
As many Americans are worried about Trump building a private police force and using the National Guard for civilian law enforcement in American cities, which is the most public and front-facing example of how law enforcement has been politicized at the federal level, there are more subtle concentrations and partisanizations of formerly independent parts of the government that too many Americans and the mainstream media now accept as normal.
Donald Trump changed the way that presidents interact with the press when he made an intentional decision to limit his interviews to mostly friendly conservative media outlets like Fox News and Newsmax.
The president would no longer theoretically be available to all news outlets to sit for interviews or answer questions. Trump would be on friendly platforms where he can control the discussion.
Trump has created a separate system where he is not challenged by the press, and by extension, not accountable to the American people. In his second term, he has expanded this system to include friendly conservative questioners in the White House press pool. It has been estimated that as many as half of the journalists at the White House covering Trump on any given day could be partisan conservative media.
The presidency has been reduced to only talking to one group of partisans, and this weakening of accountability, carried out through the destruction of independence within media and federal enforcement, was put on display as Trump announced that the suspect in the Charlie Kirk shooting was in custody on Fox News.
